Thursday, March 6, 2014

Katie Made Hummus! (And it's pretty good!)

Guess what! Katie's learning to be a magician. Her first trick involved dried chickpeas! Now we have a tasty dip for all our veggies! Check it out:

She started with some regular ol' dried chickpeas.

Then soaked them overnight in the crockpot. The next day, she turned the crockpot on and cooked them for another 12 hours or so until they looked like this. She saved some of the liquid to alter the consistency of the hummus if necessary.

Then she added about two cups to the food processor thing, along with three cloves of garlic. One clove she crunched in the garlic press, then she realized that it was going to get chopped up in the food processor anyway, so using a hard-to-clean tool was silly.

Then she chopped up everything in the food processor until it looked like this, adding a couple tablespoons of chickpea water to get the consistency she wanted.

Then she added the rest of the ingredients: salt (~1 teaspoon), pepper (~0.5 teaspoon), hot sauce (4 squirts), and olive oil (3-4 tablespoons). Not pictured: lemon juice (2-3 tablespoons). Go easy on the lemon juice at first, because it can easily overpower everything and make the hummus not taste right.

Then she added about a third of a cup of sunflower flour. Last time she ground up the sunflower seeds with a mortar and pestle. This time she used a coffee grinder. Most recipes call for tahini (sesame seed paste) since the 'hummus' is actually short for 'hummus bi tahina,' or chickpeas with tahini in Arabic. We had sunflower seeds and not sesame seeds, so consider this hummus bi abed-i-shems.

Taste testing is an integral part of this process. First she tasted the isolated hummus using a model vegetable.

Then she tested with a real vegetable. It passed both tests.

Then she put it in a jar and set it in the fridge. She's not sure how long it keeps because we've always outcompeted the bacteria for it!

Soak overnight, then cook chickpeas, reserving water. In food processor, puree chickpeas and garlic, then blend in remaining ingredients except finger and vegetable stick. Use finger to test flavor and consistency, adjust as necessary by adding water or more chickpeas. When hummus passes finger test, use vegetable stick for further testing. When flavor is satisfactory on both accounts, transfer hummus to canning jar and store in fridge.

Do you make your own hummus? What's your recipe? Let us know in the comments section below!